Letters to the Editor for Friday, March 15

Letters to the Editor for Friday, March 15

No sense to Background Check Act
The Bipartisan Background Check Act (HR8), when properly spun, sounds like a commonsense law to keep guns out of the hands of felons. A desirable goal, although there are currently many laws designed to do that. Let’s look a little closer at this law and its results.
As a child I received several guns from my now deceased uncle. If I return them to my cousins, I would be a felon, as I did not first do a background check. If I lent a friend a rifle to hunt with, that constitutes an illegal transfer, again I am a felon. If I let a friend handle or shoot my gun while target shooting, that also is an illegal transfer, another felony. Think about that, letting another person handle your firearm, unless you are on the premises of a Federal Firearm Dealer, will make you a felon, subject to a year in jail and $100,000 fine. Farmers and ranchers who hand (transfer) an employee a gun to deal with predators or injured livestock would become felons. Accepting a gun from a suicidal friend would make you a felon.
It quickly becomes evident that there is no commonsense to this law, it is just another scheme to criminalize legitimate gun owners. Which, come to think of it, is probably the end goal of this law's writers.
James Van Dijk
Saratoga Springs

National Grid's lights flickering
I’m writing this letter to vent my frustration with National Grid. This is a huge company that we all depend on. On the afternoon of March 10, my daughter called me in distress saying that her lights were flashing on and off in rapid succession.
She said it was scary. She has limited cell coverage and was not sure how long her phone would work. I called the main number provided by National Grid.
After two minutes of commercials, I was told to choose option seven which was a gas leak or a life threatening emergency. Since this did not fit in that scenario, I chose the next option non-life threatening. I was on hold for more than 20 minutes, gave up and went for option seven. The woman that answered had an attitude, stated that the power was out in my daughter’s area and would be restored later in the evening was about to hang up on me when I asked her if they should unplug their appliances, she said with her attitude, if it were me I would. And then hung up. This was not an emergency per se, sitting on hold for over 20 minutes listening to what a great company National Grid is was an unpleasant surprise. I hope if I have a real emergency, someone will answer the phone promptly. Most of the workers at National Grid are hard dedicated workers, and I appreciate all that they do. They just need to work on their communication skills.
Marty Shanty
Charlton

Abortion is extremely racist
Liberals love to tell us that they are pro-abortion and anti-racist. To anyone who knows much of anything about history, this is a contradiction of terms. History shows that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was about as racist as anyone could possibly be. Margaret was a eugenicist, who created slogans like: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief aim of birth control,” and “Birth Control: to create a race of thoroughbreds.”
A director of the American Birth Control League, Sanger’s organization prior to Planned Parenthood, expressed his admiration for the Nazis’ method of cleaning up their race problems by sterilizing those who were unfit to produce children. There was little distinction made between eugenic and Nazi goals.
Adolph Hitler used birth control for the same purposes, making it and abortion illegal for Aryans, while at the same time spreading propaganda in territories outside Germany that billed abortion as safe and childbirth as a health hazard.
A graph produced by the Guttmacher Institute in 2017 shows that abortion rates by race changed from 40 percent for blacks, 27 percent for Hispanics, 10 percent for whites, and 23 percent other in 2000, to 38, 25, 14 and 23 respectively in 2014, while the total number of abortions decreased 42 percent. Fewer babies being killed overall, but still disproportionately more black and Hispanic babies than white babies. Abortion is extremely racist. Seems Sanger’s objective and that of the far left, of reducing the non-white population, is succeeding.
James Homan
Glenville